Australian current affairs program Four Corners broadcast a special episode “Sex, Lies and Julian Assange” which investigates the chronology of Wikileaks head Julian Assange’s activities in Sweden 2010 when he visited the country to address a conference and investigate basing Wikileaks’ operations in a secure computer facility there. The episode can be viewed at this link. Reporter Andrew Fowler narrates his detailed inquiry into Assange’s whereabouts and associations with Sofia Wilen and Anna Ardin and how these led to the Swedish authorities issuing a warrant for his arrest on charges of rape and sexual molestation and his forced flight to the United Kingdom. Using reports and interviews with various Assange supporters and his lawyers, Fowler uncovers evidence that the rape and molestation allegations against Assange have no substance and are intended to blacken his name and turn the public around the world against him. Fowler also investigates the link between the Swedish government’s pursuit of Assange and the US government’s determination to indict Assange on charges of espionage for Wikileaks’ release of thousands of US diplomatic cables exposing American war crimes in the Middle East.

Fowler describes a blow-by-blow account of what Assange got up to in Sweden and shows that Ardin and Wilen’s groupie- like activities with and around Assange suggest he may have been set up by two honey-pots working on behalf of an unnamed agency or that the two women were under pressure to help concoct a case against him. The reporter goes on to describe the farcical series of events following the issue of the arrest warrant in which a senior prosecutor dismissed the rape allegations and Assange asked for his police interview not to be leaked to the press; in spite of assurances from the police interviewer, the interview did end up being leaked. Assange went to the UK in September 2010 and the following month saw Wikileaks’ exposure of thousands of Iraq War logs detailing US atrocities committed by US soldiers and Iraqi police between 2004 and 2009. Sweden subsequently issued an Interpol Red Notice warrant to arrest Assange and the US government began a full-scale investigation into Wikileaks and a financial blockade of the organisation.

A highlight of the program is its exhibition of a copy of the subpoena issued by a US Grand Jury showing the numbers 10 and 3793, the latter explained by Assange’s US lawyer Michael Ratner as demonstrating that Assange is to be charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. The charge is intended to link Assange’s name with that of Bradley Manning, the US soldier currently in prison for having passed material to Wikileaks. Significant also is Four Corners’ exposure of Sweden’s record in co-operating with the US, in particular its rendition of two asylum seekers to the CIA who flew the men to Egypt where they were tortured.

However nothing was said about the Swedish government’s record of secretly selling weapons or other military equipment to countries like Saudi Arabia which have rather dodgy human rights records. Nor did Four Corners refer to a bilateral treaty Sweden and the US signed in 1984, supplementary to one signed in 1961, in which Article II (point 1), interpreted broadly, allows the US to bypass standard extradition tests and procedures in requesting Sweden to extradite someone: this is the document that Assange is really afraid of. If the Swedish government has shown already that it will disregard its own laws in dealing with foreign countries that happen to have global influence or huge buckets of money, how will it treat someone like Julian Assange when the US, militarily and economically superior to Sweden, asks for or demands his extradition?

The creepiest part of the program is its spotlight on the harassment Julian Assange’s lawyers and supporters including one person Assange interviewed in his “The World Tomorrow” series have been receiving from US government agencies. What does it say about the US government’s obsession with Assange that it would send out agents to pursue people associated with Assange and entrap them into informing on him, pressure them to give up information on him or threaten them in some way? What does such treatment tell us about the police state the US has become?

The general thrust of the program is as “hard-hitting” and “direct” as would be expected of most commercially oriented current affairs programs aimed at the general public but it didn’t reveal anything or give any analysis of Assange’s plight that other news and current affairs sources have not already reached. Revelations about the Australian government’s support of the US and abandonment of Assange are well known from other news media and Four Corners simply repeated them.

Generally the program is a good summary of Assange’s plight and the events that have ensnared him and forced him to seek asylum with the Ecuadorian embassy in London. For people befuddled by the fog of disinformation emanating from British and Swedish media about the rape accusations against him, this clear-headed documentary is a welcome antidote.